FEU INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CONDUCTING BUSINESS MEETINGS (PROCEDURES AND ETIQUETTES) De Guzman, Erickson P. ENSP2 Prof. Xavier Aquino Velasco Associate/Lecturer III, FEU Tech

Steps on How to Conduct a Business Meeting

Step 1 Call the meeting to order at the scheduled start time even if someone is running late. The late-comers will have to catch up during or after the meeting is finished. If a member of your group is regularly late, pull him aside to discuss the matter.

Step 2 Respect the schedules of your meeting participants and end the meeting on time as well. If you can't cover all of the points within the allotted time, move it to the agenda of the very next meeting.

Step 3 Ask a secretary or other meeting participant to take minutes at every business meeting so that everyone will recall what was discussed and decisions made.

Step 4 Pass out a written meeting agenda to each participant to clarify the direction of the meeting. Provide an estimate of how many minutes you will spend discussing each item on the agenda if you've had issues with going over your meeting end- time in the past. Pass out the previous meeting's minutes as well.

Step 5 Introduce any guests in attendance at your business meeting before you get started.

Step 6 Summarize the purpose of the meeting and what you want to accomplish at the very beginning. Then start with the first item in your agenda.

Step 7 Follow your agenda closely and do not allow meeting participants to veer off of the order of issues to discuss. Appoint a parliamentarian--sort of a neutral mediating party when discussing issues--to help you keep the meeting on track if necessary.

Step 8 Prohibit meeting participants from insulting, talking over, talking loudly, belittling or raising his voice to other members at the meeting. This causes productivity to suffer. If someone is being repeatedly violating these basic rules of conduct at your meeting, ask him to leave.

Step 9 Transition to each new item on your agenda with finality and do not backtrack. Moderate the meeting if necessary by giving each member the go-ahead to speak his mind on the issue. Ask each person to limit her point to two minutes or less.

Step 10 Leave time at the end of the meeting for a short question and answer session to clarify points of confusion during the meeting or to allow a particularly vocal participant who has a relevant and important point to voice his thoughts briefly.

Step 11 End your meeting on a positive note that inspires action. Summarizing what each member must do from this point forward to accomplish the goals and issues discussed.

Eight Ways to Make Meetings Better

1.Be prepared Meetings are work, so, just as in any other work activity, the better prepared you are for them, the better the results you can expect.

2. Have an agenda. An agenda — a list of the topics to be covered during the course of a meeting — can play a critical role in the success of any meeting. It shows participants where they are going, but it's then up to the participants to figure out how to get there.

3. Start on time and end on time. Everyone has suffered through meetings that went waybeyond the scheduled ending time. That situation would be fine if no one had anything else to do at work. But in these days of faster and more flexible organizations, everyone always has plenty of work on the to-do list. If you announce the length of the meeting and then stick to it, fewer participants will keep looking at their watches, and more participants will take an active role in your meetings.

4. Have fewer (but better meetings) Call a meeting only when it is absolutely necessary. Before you call a meeting, ask yourself whether you can achieve your goal in some other way, perhaps through a one-on-one discussion with someone in your organization, a telephone conference call, or a simple exchange of . As you reduce the number of meetings you have, be sure to improve their quality.

5. Include, rather than exclude. Meetings are only as good as the ideas that the participants bring forward. Great ideas can come from anyone in an organization, not just its managers.

6. Maintain the focus. Meetings can easily get off track and stay off track. The result? Meetings do not achieve their goals. Meeting leaders and participants must actively work to keep meetings focused on the agenda items. Topics should not include the results of the latest football game, or who had lunch with whom, or who's driving that shiny new Porsche. Whenever you see the meeting drifting off track, speak up and push the other attendees to get it back in focus.

7. Capture and assign action items. Unless they are held purely to communicate information, or for other special purposes, most meetings result in action items, tasks, and other assignments for one or more participants. Don't assume that all participants are going to take their assignments to heart and remember all the details. Instead, be sure that someone has agreed to take on the job of record keeping. Immediately after the meeting, summarize the outcome of the meeting, as well as assignments and timelines, and a copy of this summary to all attendees.

8. Get feedback. Every meeting has room for improvement. Be sure to solicit feedback from meeting attendees on how the meeting went right for them — and how it went wrong. Was the meeting too long? Did one person dominate the discussion? Were attendees unprepared? Were the items on the agenda unclear? Whatever the problems, you can't fix them if you don't know about them. You can use a simple form to solicit feedback, or you can simply informally speak with attendees after the meeting to get their input.